The Round Files
by Locker51
Summary: Agent April Graighly is assigned to a small office in the basement of the FBI headquarters, only to find that is has not been cleaned out since the last agent. Her facination in the mysterious "X-Files" is only overridden by her intense curiousity about w


The Round Files:

The truth is still out there.

Episode 1

FBI Agent April Graighly walks slowly down a flight of stairs in headquarters, glancing down at a slip of paper in her hands. A janitor is sweeping the aisles of filing cabinets in the dim lighting. Graighly walks toward him.

"Excuse me! Sir?"

The janitor looks up. Graighly approaches. "Sir, do you know where this room is? I was told this would me my new office."

The man takes the slip of paper and after looking over the scribbled writing, he looks up at her with squinty black eyes. "Certainly aren't too popular around here, are you?"

"What?" Graighly smiles timidly. 

"The office," he says with another squinty look and a point toward the far end of the file room, "is over there." As she begins to walk away, he calls after her, "It hasn't been touched in years, though. Needs some cleaning out. Here!" He walks over to his cleaning cart and pulls out a trash bag. With a grin he hands it to her. "You might need this."

"Why wasn't it cleaned out before?" Graighly asks.

"Because the bureau has had the door locked."

"What was in there before?"

The janitor shrugged. "Beats me."

Graighly smiles again, and then walks toward the room. The janitor goes back to his sweeping, not without a quick glance at the young agent who has been assigned to the unwanted room. 

Graighly digs about in her pocket for the key to the door, and when she finds it, she inserts it and hears the click of the lock. The door swings open poorly, the hinges squeaking. The room is dark. She reaches inside the door and flips on the light, only to find a strange spectacle before her. The office, for it was previously an office, is decorated in all means of UFO paraphernalia. A particularly large poster with the words "I want to believe" under a fuzzy image of a supposed UFO caught Graighly's eye. She steps into the office, upsetting the trashcan with her leg. Piles of paper still lay all over the room, as if they'd just been left an hour ago. 

"What is this place?" Graighly wonders aloud just as she opens the file cabinet beside the cluttered desk. One file is bigger than the others. She pulls it out, reading the tab: The X-Files. She opens the folder, and begins scanning the first sheet. It's a report on a mysterious occurrence in a small town, where seven students from the same graduating class were killed out in the woods by an unexplained phenomenon. There was mention of small metal devices found in all the corpses, in the nasal area, and also a mention that the substance they were made of was undeterminable. Graighly sank into the office chair. Her eyes continue to move across the pages. 

8:51 pm

HEADQUARTERS

A slight knock on the door frame startles Agent Graighly. She looks up and sees the janitor watching her with a raised eyebrow. The room that had been untidy before is now a complete disaster. Papers are everywhere; all over the desk, scattered about the floor, and a large pile still lays on Graighly's lap. 

"Yes?" Graighly asks, looking at the man through her reading glasses.

"I just came to let you know that I'm closing up down here. It's almost nine. If you want to stay on, that's fine."

"Oh, um," Graighly glances at her watch. "Yes, I think I'll stay here a little longer."

The janitor nods, and walks away. Graighly watches him until he disappears around the corner of the line of filing cabinets, and she hears his footsteps going up the stairs. She looks back down at the papers in her lap. Photos, reports, random odds and ends that all fit into the puzzling cases that had been earlier, from the original reports, been blown off as just some strange homicide, kidnapping, amnesia, or simply the imagination of the victims involved. She glanced down again at the bottom of the report. It was signed by Agent Dana Scully. Graighly has found this name at the bottom of every analytical report, all written in a very logical, unassuming way that suggested one who was seeing things, but perhaps not believing them, or willing to look at conventional ways to explain them. There had been another agent on the cases, however. Graighly picks up several disks from the file, all with the name F. Maulder scribbled across them with a thick black marker. She rubs her eyes and looks at her watch again. It's almost ten. She stands up to leave, and as she does so, a pile of papers is unsettled, and they slip to the floor. A photograph falls out. It's a picture of a man with dark hair, around his mid-thirties, and a woman with red hair, about the same age. They are both wearing long, dark coats, and dress that is typical of FBI workers. 

Graighly bends over and picks up the image. On the back is written in small, feminine handwriting, "Me and Fox, 1993." Graighly puts the picture in the file, and closes the cover, and stands up, catching herself on the desk as she almost slips on a sheet left on the floor. 

Graighly walks out of the building, it's late, the streets are empty. As she walks toward her car, she takes out her keys and pushes the "unlock" button. Suddenly, her car explodes. Graighly is knocked to the ground, watching the ball of fire roar as the gas in her tank fed the fire. The light from it is bright enough to see the entire parking lot. A car pulls away in the distance. Graighly is alone.     


End file.
